Pushing its target forward by an entire year, BT aims to have its super-fast Infinity Broadband delivered to two-thirds of U.K. premises by the end of 2014 by hiring a further 520 engineers, most of whom will be ex-armed forces; "we are proud that most of these jobs will be filled by ex-armed forces personnel" BT announced, in what's bound to be a crowd-pleaser and frankly not at all a bad move, putting good skill to use and helping the UK's vets to find work.
To achieve this target BT is bringing forward £300 million of investment from its £2.5 billion investment pot in order to "help the government achieve its ambition of having the best super-fast broadband network in Europe by 2015".
If BT was able to push forward its roll-out without incurring significant overheads we don't understand why it didn't do so sooner, perhaps jittery investors, though it makes sense to get a product rolled-out as soon as possible to begin reaping the benefits.
This all comes as happy news as BT recently announced that it intends to raise download speeds up to 300Mbps by spring next year in an attempt to create a gap between itself and competitor Virgin Media, who may soon find out that not investing in significant new fibre all these years may not have been the best move after all.
The hopes for this roll-out, of course, are to both boost growth in the UK economy and to please the public, as many Internet users are finding ADSL to be less and less sufficient. Higher speeds at affordable costs enable businesses to better utilise the Internet in their future strategies and for home-users to experience the richer content that these strategies are likely to produce.
